[Tok_Tok]

I'm helping someone with learning maxwell in sketchup and i can't figure out why the textures, in the viewport, aren't tiling when i change
the tile settings in the material editor. They don't change in the viewport when i do this. This could be something very simple but i just cant figure out what it is.

Does anybody know a solution?

[Half Life]

I just avoided the issue altogether and left the tiling at 1 and 1 in the plugin (the same for MXED) and use the Texture>Position context menu command in Sketchup to handle all of the scaling/tiling/rotation of textures/UVs.

Best,
Jason.

[Tok_Tok]

Going to give that a shot, thanx!

[JDHill]

The texture scale and offset in the material editor is not, and is not intended to be, shown in the viewport. In SketchUp, the size of the texture is specified in absolute units, and this defines texture UV space. It is UV space which is represented by the texture thumbnail in the material editor, and you are able to scale/offset your textures there in relation to that space.

[Tok_Tok]

So if I understand this correctly, the texture shown in the viewport is just an indication of which material is applied to an object. Nothing you change in the material editor is shown in the viewport
but will render the way you set it. Because also when I change the UV setting to Cubic or Plane, nothing changes in the viewport..

I can't do test renders because i'm not yet on a Pro version of sketchup.

[Half Life]

It depends on how you set up the material -- but what you see in the viewport are the UV's unless you use the UV overide context menu, in which case all UV's will be set to .25m x .25m.

For somebody who is comfortable in Sketchup I would recommend using the Sketchup UV's in all instances but spherical.

Best,
Jason.

[JDHill]

So if I understand this correctly, the texture shown in the viewport is just an indication of which material is applied to an object. Nothing you change in the material editor is shown in the viewport but will render the way you set it.

It is not accurate to say that nothing you do in the material editor is shown in the viewport; in fact most things you do are shown. If you change which texture is used, you can push the new texture into the viewport (i.e. into the related SketchUp material) from the texture editor (see the little blue up/down arrows).

Similarly, if the color of the material is set to Link to Application, then changing the color of the material will also change the color of the associated SketchUp material/texture. It is really only the texture editing functions, which have no equal representation in SketchUp which are not represented visually. That is due to limitations of how SketchUp materials are defined: where a SketchUp material has only one, a Maxwell material has multiple textures -- how can they all be 'shown' in the viewport, if they use different scaling and such?

Because also when I change the UV setting to Cubic or Plane, nothing changes in the viewport..

Yes, these are special export-time-only features, and their primary purpose is to deal with the situation where you have assigned a textured MXM material, but have not used any texture in the associated SketchUp material. In that case, there would be no UVs generated by SketchUp for the entities using that material, so the MXM could not be rendered properly.

[Tok_Tok]

Thanx for the info on why and how. Doing the texture tiling via sketchup (as Jason mentioned) worked, in fact it works very well. I did't know
that sketchup had such a good texture positioning interface, 3ds max could learn something from that the visual aspect i mean.

There is still one thing that's not very logic to me; why aren't the materials not listed in alfabetic order?

[JDHill]

I should be able to change that -- currently, they are just listed in whatever order they're given to the plugin by SketchUp.

[Tok_Tok]

To me, that would be an improvement. When you've imported 20 materials it's hard to remember when you've actually imported one and you
have to search for the one you are looking for. So groups, by theme or color would be very useful, or just alfabetic.